In the last weeks, I stopped being motivated to work on the eglibc package, it s not fun as it was before. Maintaining this package is taking a lot of my (free) time, and I am not anymore able to follow the bug rate, especially for RC bugs or bugs that I consider high priority. In turn it does not give me time to integrate eglibc 2.11 or other wishlist features I would have liked to see (rework of the locales* packages, using multiarch paths, etc.). I hope it s only a bad moment and that things will change soon, so I can find time to work on GNU/kFreeBSD, QEMU or to do electronics. In any case you can help by handling bug reports or writing patches. Everything is in the BTS!

Last year, after many years of peacefully living the whole year in GMT-3, our government decided that Argentina should use DST again. This was done in a rush, but patches were written and applied everywhere to have a correct timezone. Fixing the problem was not enough, tzdata's upstream decided to predict the future:

# From Paul Eggert (2007-12-22):
# For dates after mid-2008, the following rules are my guesses and
# are quite possibly wrong, but are more likely than no DST at all.
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=1  0:00    1:00    S

Well, back in December 2007, October 2008 might have seemed like a long time in the future, and they assumed that sometime in the middle the correct date would be announced... But, predictably (knowing Argentina's current government), no DST has yet been announced. However, Paul Eggert's guesses had propagated to almost all UNIX distributions, so that at 0:00 Sunday Oct 5th, all our computers were suddenly one hour ahead of time. Affected systems: Debian, Ubuntu, Gentoo, Red Hat, OpenBSD, FreeBSD, Mac OS. Devices: ipod, maemo, Nokia N95. Websites: Clarin (a major newspaper - still broken 36 hours later), Gmail. And probably many others that I don't know of. I even read that Windows was affected, although I don't know how that might be possible, since as far as I know they don't use tzdata. Anyway, not satisfied with how they mistakenly predicted the future before, a few weeks ago (not enough time in advance to fix almost any systems, only sid had this release), they added this change:

# From Alexander Krivenyshev (2008-09-05):
# As per message from Carlos Alberto Fonseca Arauz (Nicaragua),
# Argentina will start DST on Sunday October 19, 2008.
#
# http://www.worldtimezone.com/dst_news/dst_news_argentina03.html
# http://www.impulsobaires.com.ar/nota.php?id=57832 (in spanish)
Rule    Arg 2007    only    -   Dec 30  0:00    1:00    S
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Mar Sun>=15 0:00    0   -
Rule    Arg 2008    max -   Oct Sun>=15 0:00    1:00    S

So, they decided to take the word of a guy from Nicaragua (no bad feelings against Nicaragua, but I think that this kind of stuff should be informed by people from the affected country), and from a couple of articles that say that "According to some sources, we might have to change our clocks on the third Sunday of October". Would you change tzdata sources with such information? I definitely wouldn't. Anyway, Aurelien Jarno has already uploaded fixed packages, with no assumption regarding when the DST will happen, which is the sensible thing to do in a case like this. Thanks Aurel!

New features usually come with new versions. Before reporting a bug for a new feature, it may be a good idea to make sure you are using the latest version. apt-get can be really useful for that.

Ok so there were some reactions to the Call for help post. I had three direct offers for help in pkg-xfce, not sure if other teams had such propositions. Some people asked me to correct various number for the active contributors . Basically, the numbers are what the feeling I got from people working in those team. Julien Cristau wants me to correct the number of debian-x active contributors to 0. (yes, zero, that means nobody, nadie, personne). Basically he doesn't have time anymore, and Brice Goglin can't really keep up. So, for those who care about shiny X effects, and stuff like that, you help would be gladly appreciated (and no, you don't have to own each and every chipset in the world to give some time). Aurelien Jarno wants me to add that at the moment there are 2 (two) active libc contributors, plus one on GNU/Hurd and one on kfreebsd. Frans Pop wants me to add that there are ~85 people working on d-i and that the problems the team might face aren't only related to the lack of manpower (and I don't really want to enter politics) Finally, it seems that some people (well, only one at the moment, but it's enough for to feel the need to precise) though the numbers previously given would dismiss contributions for the active contributors. That wasn't my intention, so I apologize if you are an active contributor in one of that team and thought I dismissed your contribution. If it wasn't clear enough, my point is to show that quite some teams are lacking manpower (some team miss other things too, like leadership, coordination or whatever) and users shouldn't be scared to contribute to them. Those are core teams, without them Debian wouldn't work at all (not to mention derivatives), so it's a good idea to join them. Now, what if you do want to help, but don't know how. On the previous post I gave links to teams website, wiki page or QA page. You should be able to find a mailing list or contact mail you should be able to write to. Just write that you want to offer some help, that you don't know how and where to start. Add what you're interested in, what you find fun, and your technical knowledge. Don't be shy, and you don't need to be a Debian Developer (nor even a Debian Maintainer) to contribute. Thanks!

pub   4096R/1DDD8C9B 2009-05-09
      Key fingerprint = 7746 2642 A9EF 94FD 0F77  196D BA9C 7806 1DDD 8C9B
uid                  Aurelien Jarno <aurel32@debian.org>
uid                  Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@aurel32.net>
uid                  Aurelien Jarno <aurelien@jarno.fr>
sub   4096R/C3FCA1A8 2009-05-09

I ll get it signed by other Debian Developers tomorrow, during the Debian France meeting.

I have just uploaded Embedded GLIBC (EGLIBC) into the archive (it is currently waiting in the NEW queue), which will soon replace the GNU C Library (GLIBC). The EGLIBC is a variant of the GLIBC which stays source and binary compatible with the original GLIBC. While primarily targeted for embedded architectures, it has some really nice points:

• More friendly upstream (especially with regard to embedded architectures): Encourage cooperation, communication, civility, and respect among developers (as opposed to this).
• Stable branch with fixes for important bugs (a real one, not like the GLIBC one which is left unchanged).
• Better support for embedded architectures.
• Support for different shells (GLIBC only supports bash).
• Support for building with -Os.
• Configurable components (do we really need NIS or RPC support in debian-installer?).
• Better testsuite for optimized or biarch packages.

We do not use some of these features yet, but this upload is a first step. From the user point of view, the package names are unchanged (except the source package and the binary package containing the sources) so no transition is needed.

Following the release of Debian Lenny, I have updated my set of Debian QEMU images. The following images are now available:

• AMD64 (Etch and Lenny)
• ARM (Etch and Lenny)
• ARMEL (Lenny)
• i386 (Etch and Lenny)
• MIPS (Etch and Lenny)
• MIPSEL (Etch and Lenny)
• PowerPC (Etch and Lenny)
• SPARC (Etch)

There is no Debian Lenny SPARC image available, as QEMU does not fully support SPARC64 yet, and Debian Lenny now only supports 64-bit kernels. Note also that the README.txt files (which among other things contain the md5sums of the images) is now GPG signed. Read carefully these files as they contain details on how to use the images, and especially the minimum QEMU version to use.

Copy of http://lists.debian.org/debian-devel/2009/04/msg00421.html. Hi folks, We have been pretty busy these past few weeks with the whole Google Summer of Code 2009 student application process.
I can say that we have this year a very good set of proposals and I d like to thank all the students and mentors for this. I am going to present to you our shortlist of projects that we would like to be funded and believe we can reasonably manage to get funded. As always, remember that the number of slots is not final yet at this point so we can t promise anything. The first preliminary slot count given today was *10* (same as last year) and we hope to get *2* more (as we did last year). This shortlist is alphabetically ordered because we don t want to reveal the current internal rankings. I am inviting you to debate what you think is cool, what is useful, what is important to Debian, maybe give us pointers to resources or people that could be helpful for the projects. We will try to alter our current rankings to reflect the zeitgeist in Debian, while taking into account the personal information that we have about each student involved. The deadline for any modification is on the 15th, so get everything in by the 14th. The final selected projects will be announced by Google April 20th, ~12 noon PDT / 19:00 UTC. We ll have another announcement then. Three proposals need or may need a mentor, I indicated it. For more information about the projects or mentoring and how to talk to us directly, scroll down past the list. Debian s Shortlist : - Aptitude Package Management History Tracking
- Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling
- Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back
- Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings
- Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD
- KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager
- Large Scientific Dataset Package Management
- MIPS N32 ABI Port
- MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation
- On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration
- Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives
- Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite And the details: Aptitude Package Management History Tracking Student: Cristian Mauricio Porras Duarte, Mentor: Daniel Burrows Aptitude currently does not track actions that the user has performed beyond a single session of the program. One of the most frequent requests from users is to find out when they made a change to a package, or why a package was changed; we want to store this information and expose it in the UI in convenient locations. As a side effect, this might also provide some ability to revert past changes. Automatic Debug Packages Creation and Handling Student: Emilio Pozuelo Monfort, Mentor: Marc Brockschmidt This proposal aims at providing debug binary packages for the packages in the Debian archive in an automatic manner, moving them away from the official Debian archive to an special one. This has the benefits of providing thousands of debug packages without any work needed from the developers, for all the architectures, without bloating
the archive. Debbugs Web UI: Amancay Strikes Back Student: Diego Escalante Urrelo, Mentor: Margarita Manterola The Amancay project aims to be a new read/write web frontend to Debian s BTS; allowing DDs and contributors to easily interact with bugs via an intuitive yet powerful interface, enabling new workflows and creating new contribution opportunities like triaging while upholding reporting quality. Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings Student: Jonathan Yu, Mentor: (probably) Dominique Dumont see below This project proposes a common library for parsing and manipulating Debian Control files, including control, copyright and changelog. Main ideas include validating and parsing of these files, with both Strict and Quirks modes for the parser. The second idea is a new frontend for Debconf using Qt4 (for which Perl bindings will be written). Debian-Installer Support for GNU/kFreeBSD Student: Luca Favatella, Mentor: Aurelien Jarno GNU/kFreeBSD is currently using a hacked version of the FreeBSD installer combined with crosshurd as its own installer. While this works more or less correctly for standard installations (read: the exact same installation as in the documentation), it does not allow any changes in the installation process except the hard disk partitioning. This project is about porting debian-installer on GNU/kFreeBSD, and to a bigger extent, make debian-installer less Linux dependant. KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager Student: Mateusz Marek, Mentor: NEEDS MENTOR, see below. Finish Adept 3.0, a fully integrated package manager for Qt4/KDE4. Adept is currently the only viable path to a Debian native package manager on KDE that would support modern features such as tags, indexed search or good conflict resolving. With Aptitude-gtk still in development and only available for GTK+ and (K)PackageKit having fundamental problems, Debian needs this project to stay in control of its package management on KDE after much neglect in the recent years. Large Scientific Dataset Package Management Student: Roy Flemming Hvaara, Mentor: Charles Plessy Large public datasets, like databases for bioinformatics are typically too big and too volatile to fit the traditional source/binary packaging scheme of Debian. There are some programs that are distributed in Debian, like blast and emboss, that can index specialised databases, but Debian lacks a tool to install or update the datasets they need and keep their indexing in sync. MIPS N32 ABI Port Student: Sha Liu, Mentor: Anthony Fok This project first focuses on creating a new MIPS N32 ABI port for Debian. Different from O32 and N64, N32 is an address model which has most 64-bit capabilities but using 32-bit data structures to save space and process time. A second focus will be given on making such a mipsn32el arch fully optimized for the Loongson 2F CPU which gains more and more popularity in subnotebooks/netbooks in many countries. MTD Embedded Onboard flash Partitioning and Installation Student: Per Andersson, Mentor: Wookey Many embedded devices have MTD onboard flash as persistent storage like the Kurobox Pro NAS, the Neo Freerunner, the Sheeva Plug or the OLPC. With MTD flash being so popular and with increases in capacity, support for MTD partition/installation would make Debian even more interesting to a wide range of of devices, making it one step closer to being universal. On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration Student: David Wendt Jr, Mentor: (probably) Steffen Moeller see below In many academic fields, as well as commercial industries, people use clusters to distribute tasks among multiple machines. Many times this is done by packaging a whole operating system disk image, uploading it onto the cluster, and having the cluster run it in a VM. This project intends to make it easier for Debian to distribute prepared disk images templates like they distribute CD images now, for the users to recreate or customise these templates with Debian packages and for administrators to host such clusters with Debian. Port back update-manager to Debian and all Derivatives Student: Stephan Peijnik, Mentor: Michael Vogt The project would involve taking the distribution-(Ubuntu-)specific update-manager code, analyzing it, and creating a package with just its core functionality, decoupling the distribution-specific parts and thus making the core code extensible by distribution-specific add-ons. This in turn would remove the need of porting update-manager to Debian with every upstream release. An additional optional goal would be replacing the synaptics-backend with a python-apt based one. Debian Autobuilding Infrastructure Rewrite Student: Philipp Kern, Mentor: Luk Claes Rewrite the software that currently runs the Debian autobuilding infrastructure in a way that makes it more maintainable and robust. It will use Python as its programming language and PostgreSQL for the database backend. By harmonizing buildds, many build failures can be prevented and wasteful workload on buildd volunteers can be reduced. On mentoring:

• KDE/Qt4 Adept 3.0 Package Manager:

Petr Rockai, the original developer of Adept has offered help to anyone willing to adopt Adept. Sune Vuorela has offered help for any Qt4 and KDE related issues. *We really need a mentor here*. The student is quite competent but Google dictates that we provide a mentor to handle student management.

• Control Files Parsing/Editing Library/Qt4-Debconf Qt4-Perl bindings:

Dominique Dumont, although not DD, has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been confirmed yet. Sune Vuorela has offered to help co-mentor for the Qt4-Debconf and Qt4-Perl bindings part.

• On-demand Cloud Computing with Amazon EC2 and Eucalyptus Integration:

Steffen Moeller has signaled interest in mentoring this, although it hasn t been formally confirmed yet. Charles Plessy of the Debian Med team will provide help for use cases related issues. Eric Hammond, developer of the original vmbuilder image creation tool and maintainer of a set of Debian and Ubuntu images will provide help for Amazon EC2 and image creation issues. Chris Grzegorczyk from the Eucalyptus team will provide help for Eucalyptus and Eucalyptus/Debian integration issues. Contacting us: Considering the tight schedule, most stuff happens live on IRC: #debian-soc on irc.debian.org You can also consult our wiki page for some additional information:
<http://wiki.debian.org/SummerOfCode2009> We have a mailing-list at:
<http://lists.alioth.debian.org/mailman/listinfo/soc-coordination> Keep this discussion on debian-devel@lists.debian.org while cc-ing soc-coordination@lists.alioth.debian.org. This thread is for debian-devel primarily.

The hotel we are staying in for FOSDEM is providing an expensive wireless access limited to 15kB/s. For a faster access the solution is to use IP-over-DNS for a rate up to 48kB/s. Moreover it s free

Wouter, I really doubt that the decision of having a Xen build daemon has been taken in a team, and the fact is that it s causing problems. The only goal of my post is to show we have double standards.

There has been a few flam^Wdiscussions about emulated build daemons, each time coming to the conclusion that we should not upload packages built on an emulated machine to the archive. However Debian has started to use at least one paravirtualized (Xen) build daemon, the i386 experimental one. The result is that one of the tests of the GNU libc testsuite is failing. On the other hand, the GNU libc and the GCC testsuites are giving the same results on a QEMU emulated machine and a real machine, for amd64, arm, armel, i386, mips, mipsel and powerpc. Same for KVM on amd64 and i386. I wonder if we made the right choice

For a few weeks Laurent Vivier, Blue Swirl and myself have been working on getting QEMU PowerPC working correctly with recent distributions. QEMU used to rely on OpenHackWare for the OpenFirmware implementation on PowerPC. It is a very limited implementation (for example it as no Forth support), which is unable to boot most 2.6.x kernels with the OldWorld emulation. It is able to boot recent kernels with the PReP emulation, but things like the PCI bus emulation are not working correctly. Moreover the PReP kernels are gone with the removal of the arch/ppc tree. OpenBIOS was already used for the OpenFirmware implementation of Sparc 32 and Sparc 64 targets. It now supports PowerPC for the OldWorld emulation. As a result it is now possible to use Debian PowerPC under QEMU emulating an OldWorld machine. What works?

• Display (partly), keyboard, hard disk, network;
• Booting from CD-ROM or from disk using Quik;
• Installation of Debian Etch or Lenny (but due to a bug in debian-installer quik.conf has to be fixed manually);
• Standard Debian kernels;
• G3 CPU emulation: the testsuite results of the GNU libc 2.7 and of GCC 4.3 (Debian packages) are the same than on a real machine.
• virtio devices

What doesn t work / has to be done?

• A few devices part of the MacIO chipset are not emulated and/or are replaced by other devices: IDE, SCSI, Ethernet and sound;
• The red and green colors are reversed, in some modes only (in debian-installer for example);
• X only outputs some strange images;
• PCI devices using I/O ports don t work (like the RTL8029 card, or the RTL8139 card with the 8139too driver).

For those who want to test, an Etch image is available. You will need to compile QEMU by manually given that the version in Debian is too old and that openbios-ppc is still in the NEW queue.

In late August some m68k porters have had a meeting in Kiel where we discussed several m68k related topics. One of those was the upcoming move from buildd.debian.org, because the m68k wasn't allowed to release since sarge. Other people might argue that m68k failed to meet the release criteria. Anyway...

Today the switch to debian-ports was made and the first m68k buildds are already building from debian-ports' wanna-build database. Buildd.Net already reflects that move.

I would like to thank everyone involved in the switch, especially Stephen Marenka and Aurelien Jarno! :-)

Another point release for Etch has been done; now it's the time for the CD team to roll out new images after the next mirror pulse. The official announcements (prepared by Alexander Reichle-Schmehl, thanks!) will follow shortly afterwards. FTP master of the day was Joerg Jaspert, who did his first point release since Woody, as he told us on IRC. We appreciate your work and you spending your time that shortly before going to Argentina. This point release includes the etchnhalf update introducing a new kernel image (based on 2.6.24) and some driver updates. Additionally the infamous openssl hole will be fixed for good, even for new installs. Again I want to present you a list of people who contributed to this release. It cannot be complete as I got the information out of the Changed-by fields of the uploads.

• akira yamada
• Alexander Sack
• Alexander Schmehl
• A Mennucc1
• Andrea De Iacovo
• Andres Salomon
• Aurelien Jarno
• Charles Plessy
• Christian Perrier
• Christian Welzel
• Colin Watson
• dann frazier (indefatigable kernel worker, most sourceful uploads)
• Darren Salt
• Devin Carraway (3rd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Emmanuel Lacour
• Eric Dorland
• Fabio Tranchitella
• Faidon Liambotis
• Fathi Boudra
• Florian Weimer
• Francesco Paolo Lovergine
• Francois Marier
• Frank Lichtenheld
• Frans Pop (thanks for your d-i work!)
• Frederic Peters
• Gregory Colpart
• Holger Levsen
• Jan Wagner
• Jay Berkenbilt
• J r my Bobbio
• Joey Hess
• Joey Schulze
• Josselin Mouette
• Julien Cristau
• Kai Hendry
• Kurt Roeckx
• LaMont Jones
• Laszlo Boszormenyi
• Martin Pitt
• maximilian attems
• Michael Biebl
• Michael Koch
• Mike Hommey
• Moritz Muehlenhoff
• Noah Meyerhans
• Ola Lundqvist
• Otavio Salvador
• Patrick Matth i
• Petter Reinholdtsen
• Philipp Kern
• Pierre Habouzit
• Raphael Hertzog
• Rene Engelhard
• Robert Millan
• Roberto Lumbreras
• Roland Mas
• Romain Beauxis
• Russ Allbery
• Sean Finney
• Stefan Fritsch
• Steffen Joeris
• Stephen Gran
• Steve Kemp
• Sune Vuorela
• Thijs Kinkhorst (2nd place of sourceful uploads, due to security work)
• Thomas Viehmann
• Toni Mueller
• Tzafrir Cohen

From the Release Team we had dann frazier (who drove the important kernel part of etchnhalf), Luk Claes, Neil McGovern, Andreas Barth, Martin Zobel-Helas and me working on it. ;-)

As already announced by Julien Blache, I successfully passed my PhD defense today, and I am now a doctor. During my PhD, I designed and implemented an optical simulator for the MUSE instrument, an integral field spectrograph which will be installed on one of the large European telescopes of the VLT.

As I am one of those who have read “able” instead of “unable”, I had to find a really cheap flight. This may sound crazy, but an Iberia flight to Buenos Aires from Berlin costs far less than from Lyon (where I live) or even from Madrid: 781.12 EUR from Berlin instead over 1,200.00 EUR from Madrid and over 1,300.00 EUR from Lyon (in both cases with a change in Madrid Barajas). I wonder if Iberia pays you 420,00 EUR if you flight from Berlin to Madrid… Now I have to find a cheap way to go to Berlin from Lyon (probably an EasyJet flight). I plan to spend a few days of holiday in Berlin before flying to Argentina.

Dear lazyweb, I encounter MTU problems with an IPsec setup and NAT. Here is a simplified version of my setup: remote host --- internet ---> (eth0) gateway (eth1) --- LAN As you may have guess, the gateway has only one public IP address and thus the hosts on the LAN are connected to the internet through NAT. The connection between the remote host and the gateway is secured using IPsec (kame tools), and this works as expected as long, as the connection is done between the remote host and the gateway. The problems arise when I try to make a connection between the remote host and one host from the LAN. Due to the use of IPsec, the MTU is reduced by 44 bytes, however “ICMP need to frag” packets are not emitted by the gateway, so the connection just hangs. I have tried various solution from the web (setting MTU on the various interfaces, clamping MSS with iptables, defining advmss with ip route, etc.), and the only one which actually works is reducing the MTU on the LAN hosts. Not very useable given that they are a lot of hosts on the LAN. Note that when IPsec is disabled, if I lower the MTU of eth0, the “ICMP need to frag” packets are correctly emitted, and the connection just works. Suggestions?

Some of you may have noticed that I was mostly unavailable those last weeks. I was finishing writing my PhD report. It is now submitted, so I have more free time again. I am currently processing the backlog. If you are waiting for an action from my side, you should get some news in the next few days.

Today I upgraded my BIOS in the hope to solve various issues. When I rebooted the machine, it didn’t get an IP address through DHCP: the Ethernet MAC address has been changed by the BIOS upgrade. Now compare the old and the new Ethernet MAC addresses:

old address: 0:1a:4d:60:72:e0
new address: e0:72:60:4d:1a:0
Time to laugh…

We now have a second GNU/kFreeBSD build daemon building the kfreebsd-amd64 architecture. It has been kindly offered and is hosted in UK by The Positive Internet Company Ltd. It adds redundancy to our buildd network, which is important given that the other kfreebsd-amd64 build daemon machine is on a simple ADSL line, and so less reliable than a machine in a datacenter. For those who want to know more, here is the current status of the GNU/kFreeBSD buildd network:

• callisto.debian.net (kfreebsd-amd64)
  2 x Opteron 1.4GHZ, 1GB RAM
  Hosted by The Positive Internet Company
• shockley.aurel32.net (kfreebsd-amd64)
  Sempron 2600+, 1GB RAM
  Hosted by Aurelien Jarno (ADSL)
• hagrid.debian.net (kfreebsd-i386)
  PIII 800 MHz, 512MB RAM
  Hosted by ETH Z rich
• maxwell.aurel32.net (kfreebsd-i386)
  Sempron 2600+, 1GB RAM
  Hosted by Aurelien Jarno (ADSL)

My goal is to eventually get rid of all build daemons that I am hosting at home on my ADSL line, though that is less critical now.